Recovering Irish Famine Architecture through Women’s Labour and Art Practice

Few forms of architecture are as desolate or as hauntingly absent as an bothán, a small, makeshift dwelling inhabited by impoverished Irish families during the Great Famine (An Gorta Mór, or the Great Hunger, 1845–52).1 Constructed from turf and sedge thatch, these vernacular structures were precarious and ephemeral, often collapsing back into the land and leaving almost no archaeological trace. The disappearance of an bothán from the landscape is mirrored in its limited presence within material and visual culture. Symptomatic of deeper structural biases, including the marginalisation of rural, vernacular and gendered spaces, these omissions have shaped misconceptions of domestic realities during the famine.

Drawing on practice-based research, this article explores an bothán as both a fragile architectural form and a symbol of socio-political marginalisation. It centres the role of rural Irish women, whose material and emotional labour was bound to these dwellings and has been overlooked in architectural discourse. The article introduces speculative artworks that reimagine an bothán, including prose, drypoint prints, oil and cold-wax paintings as well as sculptures. These works are not reconstructions but tentative gestures that attempt to visualise erased histories of care, survival and loss.

My practice-based research emerges from a longstanding preoccupation with landscapes and architectures marked by erasure. Working in architectural practice across Northern Ireland, Scotland and New York before entering academia, I became aware of how built environments materialise historical relationships and experiences. This project began with a recognition that the spaces absent from architectural records are often those most intimately tied to the lives of the dispossessed. It proposes that creative practice offers ways to address what conventional scholarship has overlooked. The project’s origins are personal and disciplinary. Conversations about the Famine with my grandfather Ronald McDowell first drew my attention to dwellings that had left no trace in the built record. His description of ‘mud and stick houses’, ‘long since absorbed back into the land’, made me wonder what had happened to these structures, and why nothing of them survived.2

The prose piece A Multicultural Vocabulary of Landscape: An Bothán (2022) serves as a point of departure for my research.3 Through spare, historically informed language, it seeks to distil the layered meanings of the dwelling, framing an bothán less as a physical shelter than as a space marked by deprivation and endurance. The piece was developed through close engagement with historical and archival sources, in particular F.H.A. Aalen’s study of the fourth-class dwelling as a category of post-Famine housing policy; the thematic essays and housing-class maps in John Crowley, William J. Smyth and Mike Murphy’s Atlas of the Great Irish Famine, 1845–52 (2012); and Ross O’Donovan, Michael Murphy and Christian Helling’s technical documentation of Irish sod houses (2018).4

These texts provided the statistical and material detail from which the prose draws its specificity, and that it transforms through two interrelated strategies: accretion and compression. The opening sequence, ‘an bothán / … a cabin / … a hut / … a shack / … a shed / … a home / … a coffin’, moves from neutral architectural description toward finality, compressing an arc of habitation and loss into an accumulating sequence. The inventory of architectural elements distils construction records into a spare, cadenced notation to register precariousness, while words such as ‘taxed’ allow the regulatory burden of state policy to surface quietly within what reads as descriptive listing. Census statistics are set against the emptiness of the sites they once enumerated, holding official record and material absence in tension. The piece functions as a mnemonic form, shaped to hold in language what might otherwise be lost. It establishes a mode of working that assembles a counter-archive from fragments of record that the artworks carry forward into material and visual form.

Famine architecture and disciplinary omissions

Dominant visual representations of architecture in the Great Famine often foreground enduring stone ruins (fig.1). Yet for many of the rural poor, domestic life during the Famine unfolded within far more fragile structures, including an bothán (fig.2). The term translates loosely to ‘hut’ in English and refers to a dwelling typically rectangular in plan comprising a single room with earthen floors and sod walls. Construction involved laying a foundation of loose stone before trimmed sods were stacked to form walls that were ‘weak and very apt to subside’.5 Sods were the cheapest and most readily available material, and because the walls were composed entirely of organic matter, these dwellings were effectively indistinguishable from the land.

Categorised as ‘fourth-class’ housing in nineteenth-century census records, these structures were small and damp, lacking a chimney and in some cases doors or windows.6 Relief reports from the period describe families of six or more confined to a single room, sharing sleeping quarters with livestock while rain seeped through the thatch into bedding.7 Unsanitary and unstable, these dwellings offered minimal protection from the elements and often caved in on their inhabitants.

While the Irish landscape retains visible material legacies of the Great Famine, including workhouses, Famine roads and memorial sites, an bothán survives primarily through fragmentary traces.8 A photograph from Ardee Bog, Skibbereen c.1800– 99 (fig.3) and the illustration A Connemara Cabin 1846 (fig.4) show low structures with sagging roofs, sustained only through constant repair. In 2018 a replica bothán was constructed at University College Cork as part of the National Famine Commemoration (fig.5). Led by Ross O’Donovan of the Buildings and Estates Office and Mike Murphy, Head of Cartography, the replica allowed visitors to experience the dwelling’s cramped and precarious conditions and demonstrated why so little evidence of such structures survives. As Murphy observes, ‘the people were organic, the hovel was organic, the hovel collapsed down on the bodies, and everything rotted into the landscape’.9

An bothán emerged within conditions produced by colonial governance in nineteenth-century Ireland. British administrative and economic policies frequently prioritised imperial interests over local subsistence, including the continued export of foodstuffs during the Famine.10 As the historian Christine Kinealy observes, the catastrophe lay not in an absolute absence of food, but in the paradox of widespread hunger amid agricultural abundance.11 Within this political and economic context, an bothán emerged as a material response to eviction, land consolidation and insecure tenancy, which intensified precarity for the rural poor. The land-tenure system compounded these pressures. The historian Cynthia Smith notes that the land system functioned as ‘a method of government, a badge of conquest, and a means of holding in subjection of the common people’, with tenants receiving no compensation for improvements and no protection from rent increases or eviction.12 The existence of an bothán can therefore be understood as both a record of daily survival and of the structures of power that shaped life and loss during the Famine.

Murphy has pointed to an bothán’s absence from historic maps.13 Its invisibility reflects material fragility and cartographic practices that prioritised permanent structures, but also the administrative indifference that left such precarious forms of housing undocumented.14 This absence is mirrored in architectural history, which has traditionally favoured permanence, monumentality and identifiable authorship, values exemplified by stone ecclesiastical buildings, civic architecture and later, the canonical modernist house. Anonymous, perishable and improvised in construction, an bothán fell outside of these frameworks and was therefore rarely recorded or theorised. The absence of an bothán thus reflects both what failed to endure materially and what architectural history has chosen not to see.

This exclusion extends across several registers of the discipline. Historic Ordnance Survey maps of Ireland recorded stone-built structures while routinely excluding mud-walled and sod dwellings from the cartographic record.15 Architectural survey traditions, oriented towards typological classification and structural permanence, similarly bypassed buildings that resisted categorisation or survived only briefly. Within architectural historiography more broadly, narratives have privileged the authored, the monumental and the formally innovative, leaving scant room for anonymous or impermanent forms. The absence of an bothán is therefore systemic: a product of the frameworks through which architectural knowledge has been organised and transmitted.

This omission is both material and mnemonic. When a building type is neither surveyed, mapped nor theorised, it risks disappearing not only as a physical structure but as a category of architectural thought, excluded from the frameworks through which later generations understand what counts as architecture and whose ways of dwelling are deemed worthy of attention.

As Andreas Huyssen observes, modernity is marked by a recurring crisis of cultural memory, in which certain histories are rendered invisible through processes of selection and forgetting.16 Huyssen therefore maintains that memory discourses are essential to ‘regain a strong temporal and spatial grounding of life and the imagination in a media and consumer society that increasingly voids temporality and collapses space’.17 The critical heritage scholar Laurajane Smith similarly argues that heritage is not a fixed monument but something actively produced through engagement and ‘meaning making’ in the present.18 Read through this lens, an bothán may be approached as a site of memory in Pierre Nora’s sense, not because it survives intact, but because it persists as fragment, absence and trace.19

This erasure extended beyond architectural history into broader cultural life. As Kinealy observes, within Ireland there was an ‘unspoken silence about the Famine, with those who attempted to forge a collective memory being accused of being politically motivated, intellectually facile or anti-British’.20 This institutional, disciplinary and cultural silencing points to the need for alternative modes of remembering that operate through fragment and trace rather than recovery. From this perspective, the practice-based research presented in this article understands memory as active, embodied and attentive to gendered forms of loss.

Domestic space and cultural memory

The Irish Folklore Commission (Coimisiún Béaloideasa Éireann), established in 1935, undertook a systematic programme of collecting oral testimony across Ireland in 1937–8. Its archives, held at University College Dublin, constitute one of the richest sources of first-hand and inherited accounts from the Great Famine.21 The historian Maura Cronin notes that these accounts preserve memories that documentary sources excluded, offering an alternative to formal records; crucially, she identifies how the transmission of memory through mothers, grandparents and teachers shapes what is remembered and how.22 However, accounts of the lives and labour enacted within the walls of an bothán remain partial, particularly those of women. Famine-era testimonies suggest that women’s work within such dwellings encompassed cooking, nursing, childcare and the maintenance of kinship and social ties, all under conditions of extreme precarity.23 Recurring motifs in the archive centre on women’s acts of care under impossible conditions. Niall Ó Ciosáin’s analysis of the Commission’s Famine survey identifies what he refers to as ‘popular memory’: a repertoire of stories that function both as representations of scarcity and as guides to behaviour during crisis.24 Domestic ritual persists even when its material basis has been destroyed: ‘a mother who has no food for her children puts some stones into the pot on the fire and sends them to bed, and next morning finds it full of potatoes’, with charity rewarded and scarcity understood as divinely ordained.25 In this popular memory, the domestic act of care carries moral and spiritual weight far beyond mere survival.

These forms of labour were central to the daily survival of households. The hearth functioned as more than a practical feature; it was the symbolic centre of an bothán. As Stephen A. Brighton and Andrew J. Webster observe in their study of an excavated Irish cabin, the kitchen hearth was ‘the social and familial centre of the house’.26 As the site of heat, food preparation and communal life, it structured daily routines and relations of care. The Irish phrase tine láimhe (hand fire) evokes a flame sustained by human touch; a metaphor through which domestic labour, care and endurance can be understood.27

Oral histories describe fires stoked with sodden peat, meals made from foraged plants or scraps, and women using their remaining strength to close a door against the cold, intrusion, or eviction.28 These gestures transform an bothán from a site of material hardship into a space in which endurance and meaning were actively produced. Faced with scarcity and limited choices, women within an bothán helped preserve fragments of social and cultural life even as broader systems failed. Their role was not only biological or reproductive, but formative: maintaining the hearth, organising domestic space and mediating between survival and loss within dwellings that offered little protection or privacy.

Archival images frequently position women as central figures within representations of Famine-era hardship. Engravings depict them as figures of both vulnerability and endurance, particularly within scenes of eviction and illness.29 The Day After Ejectment 1848 shows a family huddled in a hedgerow: the father collapsed forward in despair while the mother shelters her children, her bent body and enfolding arms forming the ‘walls’ that temporarily hold them together (fig.6). Bridget O’Donnell’s portrait from 1849 is one of the Famine’s most haunting images (fig.7). Evicted while pregnant and gravely ill, she lost two of her children within weeks. In James Mahoney’s illustration she is pictured with her two surviving children, her steady yet grief-stricken gaze meeting the viewer’s. Reproduced in numerous newspapers and history books, this illustration has become emblematic of the Famine, embodying both the brutal unmaking of the home and the endurance of women forced to hold their families together amid devastation.30

These representations position women as more than witnesses: they function as symbolic carriers of meaning, through whom domestic life is made visible in the public realm, even as the domestic sphere is erased. Although many women held positions as workhouse matrons, caregivers, poets and historians, the visual archive emphasises their embodied experience of loss.31

Recent scholarship has expanded understandings of how the Great Famine is represented within visual and commemorative culture, particularly through the lens of gender, mourning and the politics of memory. Kinealy, Jason King and Ciarán Reilly have brought critical attention to women’s experiences, offering a necessary counterpoint to earlier, more generalised narratives of suffering and survival.32 This emphasis on gendered memory resonates with the themes explored in my research, where domesticity, absence and endurance become central motifs.

Notable artworks of Famine commemoration inform the context for this inquiry. John Behan’s Famine Mother and Children 2000 (fig.8) translates the illustration of O’Donnell into bronze, lending permanence to her testimony, while the artist’s Famine Ship 2000 (fig.9) fuses skeletal bodies into the vessel’s rigging, collapsing the distinction between emigrant and coffin ship into a single form.33

Rowan Gillespie’s Famine 1997, a group of emaciated bronze figures installed on Dublin’s Custom House Quay, illustrates how figurative commemoration can visualise suffering while risking its containment within a single, sanctioned account (fig.10). Together, these works raise questions about what modes of remembrance fix and what they foreclose. Niamh Ann Kelly’s Imaging the Great Irish Famine (2018) addresses this, analysing the visual strategies through which Famine suffering was mediated for public consumption and demonstrating how engravings in the Illustrated London News aestheticised poverty to contain its political force.34 Kelly’s reading of these images as sites of tension between documentary record and ideological framing informs my own treatment of archival imagery as partial rather than transparent.35

These studies broaden the interpretive framework through which my research can be understood, as both a contemporary artistic response and a continuation of the evolving visual discourse surrounding the Famine.

Recognising domestic labour as inseparable from the production and experience of architecture aligns this research with feminist critiques of the exclusion of gendered forms of dwelling from architectural history. In The Grand Domestic Revolution (1981) Dolores Hayden demonstrates how the spatial organisation of domestic work has been central to the reproduction of social relations, arguing that the home is a site where economic and gendered power structures are materially enacted.36 Jane Rendell’s Art and Architecture: A Place Between (2006) proposes what she terms ‘critical spatial practice’, work that ‘transgresses the limits of art and architecture and engages with both the social and the aesthetic, the public and the private’.37 Finally, in Architecture and Capitalism (2014) Peggy Deamer examines how architectural labour, including the unacknowledged labour of maintenance and care, is bound up with broader capitalist structures.38

Together, these works support an understanding of an bothán as a space constituted through the daily, gendered labour of its inhabitants. These studies illuminate acts of remembrance as inseparable from material and spatial loss. Yet an bothán, as a structure defined by fragility and disappearance, occupies an uneasy position within both visual commemoration and architectural history. Its absence from the material record raises questions that my research approaches through practice-based and curatorial methods. My work differs, however, in its sustained focus on the specific typology of an bothán and its deliberate centring of women’s domestic experience, approaching the structure as an architectural and archival absence that demands its own forms of recovery.

Reimagining absence through methodology and practice

My practice-based research reimagines an bothán as both subject and method. The dwelling’s ephemerality and absence of identifiable authorship actively shape how the work is made. Materials are chosen for their impermanence: sod and straw that will dry, crack and eventually disintegrate, cold wax surfaces that resist fixity and drypoint plates that will wear with each printing. An bothán was never the product of a single builder and the research process is dialogic. The project unfolds as a sequence of creative and curatorial interventions that privilege women’s accounts, even when mediated through male observers, and contest disciplinary hierarchies to recognise alternative forms of knowledge.

The artworks are not reconstructions but critical propositions that reclaim an bothán within architectural discourse while challenging heritage practices to confront the realities of displacement and marginality. They do so by working with, rather than against, the conditions around the dwelling’s disappearance: visualising absence rather than attempting recovery, foregrounding embodied and gendered memory over documentary authority and testing curatorial forms that remain provisional instead of definitive. Archival traces become ‘curatorial fragments’, serving as methodological prompts. The interplay of history and making extends into collaboration: conversations with curators and historians shape the work, underscoring the importance of dialogic knowledge production when rethinking lost, vernacular spaces.

A question that guides this practice-based research is, ‘How might we reimagine the erased histories of an bothán by centring women’s narratives as vital to architectural memory?’

The project employs archival traces in the studio and the exhibition space; engravings, photographs and testimonies are re-sited as testimonial anchors and objects of contemplation. Arranged not as aesthetic objects but acts of confrontation and remembering, these curatorial fragments allow us to reimagine an bothán through lived experience, to examine its fragile architecture and to reflect on the partial records of the site.39 Speculative prose, prints and maquettes sought to inhabit the sensory world of an bothán (figs.11–13). Early experiments in the studio of pencil and ink drawings and monoprints based on archival photographs sought to reconstruct an bothán with architectural precision. Collage and model-making were used as a method of layering landscape with man-made structures. These pieces, while technically resolved, appeared too fixed, echoing the illustrative conventions of Famine-era representations rather than the dwelling’s fragility. An iterative and cyclical practice was employed, defined by the philosopher Donald Schön as ‘reflection-in-action’, a process in which the practitioner ‘surfaces, criticizes, restructures, and embodies in further action the understandings implicit in the work’.40

Critical dialogue with curators and historians gave me the confidence to embrace instability. I experimented with different media and techniques, allowing lines to waver and surfaces to erode until dwelling became indistinguishable from landscape.41 In a series of oil and cold wax paintings translucent layers evoke absorption and erasure. The materials were chosen for their capacity to hold traces of process: layers can be built up, scraped back and reworked, allowing earlier marks to remain partially visible beneath the surface. Composed from earth tones, Where an Bothán Once Stood 2024 recalls horizons and bogland, while rough incisions mark the residual footprint of a vanished dwelling (fig.14). Drawing from oral testimony and archival photographs, the work situates an bothán within its consuming landscape (see figs.2 and 3). Rather than attempt reconstruction, the work emphasises absence as a material condition. Women’s labour is presented as inseparable from land, absorbed into the soil and subsequently erased from record.

To the Earth, Again 2024 explores an bothán’s material connection to the land (fig.15). Made from biodegradable materials such as sod, straw and earth, these sculptures embody the dwelling’s inherent fragility. Their forms are unfinished, shaped by hand and left to dry and crack. The decision to make four was guided by the desire to visualise the gradual dissolution of dwellings back into the landscape from which they were made. Earlier experiments with larger, more solid forms were abandoned when they began to resemble permanent architectural models. More refined prints explored the dwelling through the conventions of architectural representation, depicting a view of its facade (fig.16) and its floor plan (fig.17).

The drypoint copper plate Lines of Fragility 2024 depicts the bowed outline of an bothán (fig.18). The reflective surface of the work causes the image to flicker in and out of visibility, contrasting the permanence of copper with the vulnerability of the dwelling it records. Developed from the photograph Ardee Bog (see fig.3) and the illustration A Connemara Cabin (see fig.5), the work transforms documentary intent into a tactile, hesitant study. Lines of Fragility acknowledges the impossibility of preservation while resisting permanence as an authoritative mode of representation. The tension between durability and fragility is central to the work: the medium’s capacity for endurance and reproduction stands in contrast to an architecture that left almost no trace, so that the act of printing becomes a form of insistent, if provisional, recovery.

Working with the architectural artist Tim Ingleby, Lines of Fragility 2024 was translated into a digital surface relief model. A physical bas-relief was then fabricated from these digital files, transforming the flat image of the dwelling into tangible, spatial presence (figs.19 and 20).

The works that emerged from this research did not seek to fix the image of an bothán but to sustain its instability. The archival materials that inform them prompt acts of remembrance in which absence remains present, and impermanence becomes a condition of engagement over loss. Throughout, the process foregrounds the ethical challenge of representing historical trauma without closure. The resulting practice is cyclical rather than conclusive: fragments generate artworks, artworks produce new readings, and this reciprocity shapes a body of work developed for exhibition. Like the curatorial fragments that first provoked them, the works have been re-sited and reinterpreted across different contexts.

In 2022 the prose piece A Multicultural Vocabulary of Landscape: An Bothán was exhibited at Seeds: International Symposium of Landscape Urbanism at Centro Pecci, Prato, a symposium convened to examine how design practices might engage with displaced and marginalised landscapes across different cultural contexts. Installed as a digital projection, the piece situated an bothán alongside international case studies of vernacular inhabitation, positioning Ireland’s Famine-era dwellings within a discourse on land, loss and spatial justice. The piece contributed to a collection of work to develop a ‘multicultural vocabulary of landscape’.42

In 2024 the installation When Only Words Are Left, They Mean Everything 2024, which comprised paintings, etchings, plates and sculptures alongside archival photographs, census extracts and passages from Famine-era testimony, was exhibited at Gallery North, Northumbria University (fig.21).43 It was curated as part of the exhibition What Are Words Worth?, which explored how language operates as both evidence and absence. In the installation historical texts served as prompts for material investigation; language, image and object were brought into dialogue, drawing attention to both the symbolic and affective force of what can be recorded and the silences produced by what remains absent.

The drypoint print An Irish Cottage 2023 was included in a 2025 studio members’ exhibition at Northern Print, Newcastle, which foregrounded small-scale trial prints and proofs (fig.22).44 This early test piece emphasises process over resolution, revealing the iterative labour involved in translating archival fragments into form.

In 2025 the first printed iteration of A Multicultural Vocabulary of Landscape, a drypoint plate (see fig.16) and a print pulled from it, entered the national collection at the Ulster Museum in Northern Ireland, Belfast (fig.23). In the museum An Bothán: Memory, Loss, and Vernacular Space 2025 functions as a counter-archive, addressing the absence of Famine-era dwellings in institutional holdings and helping to restore visibility to fragile domestic shelters long excluded from architectural history.45

Across these sites and formats, the works do not resolve an bothán as a stable image, but test how architectural absence might be held, translated and encountered. Exhibition becomes an extension of method as opposed to its endpoint, requiring forms of display that remain provisional, relational and attentive to loss. As the works move between studio, symposium, gallery and museum, they operate as propositions rather than documents: re-siting archival traces, activating women’s narratives and unsettling institutional habits of preservation. They suggest a mode of architectural methods attuned not to recovery, but to the ethical labour of staying with absence.

Conclusion

An bothán has disappeared from the Irish landscape, yet it endures as a spectral presence shaped as much by erasure as by survival. Its loss was not the slow work of time alone, but the outcome of colonial governance, economic exploitation and cultural exclusion.

This practice-based research begins to reclaim an bothán as a space of both material and cultural memory, preserved through testimony, fragment and creative reimagining. Integrating archival remnants, oral histories, feminist critique and artistic practices, the project assembles a counter-archive that resists the silence of official histories. As the works have moved between different institutions, they have begun to address the very institutional gaps they set out to make visible.

By positioning an bothán within both historical and contemporary discourse, this research aligns an ephemeral Irish dwelling with other architectures of precarity. In an age of forced migration, housing crisis and ecological fragility, the project speaks to architectures of survival, from refugee shelters to informal settlements. It calls for attention to what vanishes, and for methods capable of making that vanishing visible, opening new possibilities for art history and curatorial practice: ways of curating absence, of centring gendered and domestic experience and of recognising the lives sustained within the most fragile of shelters.

This work is not concluded. The making, exhibiting and writing continue, as does the commitment to recovering the architectures and the stories of women that the historical record has yet to acknowledge.